The old Puritans did not want anyone, anywhere, to be outside the reach of their command, for fear anyone would have abnormal or unchaste sexual passions.

The new Puritans do not want anyone, anywhere, to be outside of the reach of their command for fear anyone would have the normal and chaste sexual passions, or, worse, a healthy dislike of the abnormal, perverse and unhealthy, or to teach their children likewise. Let us call them the Impuritans.

Friday, August 26, 2011

Nearly all the great captains of secular history have learned from their mistakes. But if the doctrine of Infallibility originated in Rome, nowhere is it more ardently practiced than in Washington D.C. As Napoleon once cynically observed, “in politics stupidity is not a handicap.” Only humility is. President Obama is too trapped in his own “arc of history” and too irretrievably hostage to his own self-proclaimed role as a transcendent political figure to pull off a Steve Jobs.

Shortly before his election Obama declared, “we are five days from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” From such heights it is hard to turn around and say, “I screwed up.” He is doomed by his own hubris to tragedy, for which he will suffer no financial or personal ill-effect. It is unfortunate the same can’t be said for those whose futures he will take down with him.

The president famously ascribed his woes to a “run of bad luck.” Someone should have reminded him that Nemesis, the bringer of tragedy, “originally meant the distributor of fortune, neither good nor bad, simply in due proportion to each according to what was deserved.” In that view, you make your own luck, and there is a large dose of irony in watching the Left, which believes in no deity but itself, eager to hang the rap on God.

NASA, unable to go into space seems to have morphed into another government department. James Hansen is already well known as one of the leaders of the rabid doomsday cult predicting doom at the hands modern man via global warming. He is joined by Shawn Domagal-Goldman of NASA's Planetary Science Division who believes that space aliens will wipe us out to prevent us from destroying the extraterrestrial environment.

Having been challenged by scientist who have debunked the “hockey stick” theory of global warming, who would have believed that serious scientists would drag space aliens out of the closet to frighten us? Of course, they may be working for NASA, but like Hansen these are not serious scientists and that is the problem.

This is liberal fantasy masquerading as science. Here’s a news flash for Mr. Goldman and his fellow “researchers”: The aliens aren’t invading. The report is risible, even comical. Yet behind it lies a deadly serious problem - the dangerous politicization of scientific inquiry. For years, the green lobby has claimed that Earth is going to boil over. Carbon emissions supposedly imperil humanity’s future, causing Earth’s atmosphere to heat up to the point of global catastrophe. Ice caps are melting, polar bears are dying, sea levels are rising, coastal cities will be flooded, droughts will scorch large swaths of Earth, and billions will die or be driven from their homes. It will be the end of days - the apocalypse.

In fact, the opposite is true: Earth’s atmospheric temperatures have cooled during the past decade; the polar bear population is growing; the Arctic ice caps are not melting; sea levels have remained relatively stable; and hundreds of millions in countries such as India, China and Brazil have been lifted from grinding poverty. The greenhouse-gas theory is evaporating into thin air. Climate change has been the greatest hoax of our time.

When images of Manhattan under water are replaced by space aliens wiping us out for our environmental sins, you can finally begin to understand the mindset of the Green movement. These people are genuinely deranged to the extent that they don’t even realize that their pronouncements are as laughable as someone who claims to be Jesus. I’m not going to suggest we force them to undergo psychiatric evaluation, but we should treat them the same way we cross the street to avoid the crank on the street corner ranting about the end of the world. They’re probably harmless if you ignore them. Unfortunately they seem to have convinced a good many people in public office.

Thursday, August 25, 2011

“We now have a president, and I don’t mean this disrespectfully, who is destroying these very institutions that made America great,” Inhofe, R-Okla., said.

Inhofe went on to say the Obama administration has “disarmed America,” is solely responsible for the federal budget deficit, mostly responsible for the nation’s dependence on imported oil and suffocating business with regulations.

I would hate to hear what he has to say when he's being disrespectful.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

See the USA in a Chevrolet

Want Jobs? Unleash Energy Development!

The single biggest jobs program that any current administration can sponsor is to get out of the way of domestic oil and gas development. We can create literally millions of good high paying jobs AND stop funding Middle East Terrorists.

Saudi Arabia will again become a sand-pile filled with camel drivers and the money to fund Wahhabist centers of Islamofascism will disappear.

The Utah oil shale basin is one good example. But there are literally hundreds of others like the oil off the East Coast's continental shelf and the energy deposits in the Arctic.

All are being stymied by Team Obama whose idea of a job is to hire another government employee with an outrageous salary.

Circumstances being what they are, we have decided to stick close to home this year. We hope you don’t mind if we tag along, vacationing vicariously with you through media. After all, reading that you’ve driven four under par is like a victory for all us little people and I personally pine to see the latest fashions in casual wear and fine jewelry modeled by your wives and daughters. That Eva Peron was right, it really is just as satisfying for us to watch your families of four accessing private and government jets—even two at a time—to travel to your summer homes or Martha’s Vineyard or Bermuda, as it would be for us to fly to Disney or the Gulf Coasts, and no luggage hassles or feel-copping TSA pat-downs for any of us! I call that sweet!

A chilling analysis of an operation that should send some very high ranking officials to jail. Read the whole thing.

Let’s be clear about this. Lenny and his Boyz at the ATF, CIA, DEA, FBI, ICE, DHS, CPB, IRS, State and White House were not—are not targeting the command and control (or drugs or cash) of ALL the Mexican drug cartels. Just the ones that they don’t like. The ones that the Mexican government doesn’t like....

Congressional investigators and the media need to stop acting like Operation Fast and Furious was a good op gone bad. It was a bad op gone worse. To stop this from happening again, we need to uncover and report the truth (and yes, we can handle it.) Remember that bogus “90 percent of drug cartel guns come from the U.S.” stat? In the aftermath of this debacle, it’s time we heard the full truth about Mexican cartels’ guns. I think Agent Terry’s family would agree: we owe it to the memory of his service.

It looks more and more like a multi-purpose operation intended to help the Mexican government take down some Mexican drug cartels (by arming others) and - at the same time - help the Obama administration disarm the American people.

This is a conspiracy against the American people. Will congress expose the culprits and will there be a special prosecutor? This is a real test of the American political system.

Earthquake Hype

You may have heard there was an earthquake centered in central Virginia today. If you have not heard, you have not watched TV, heard the radio or read a newspaper today.

Let me share my personal experience as a resident of Eastern Virginia. I didn’t notice it until another person in my office mentioned it. I walked over to her office and noticed that her computer screen was wiggling.

And that is the devastating earthquake that is dominating the national news today. Tempest in a teapot doesn’t begin to describe it.

“Suddenly,” Mr. Turner said of voters, “they are faced with the most brilliant, dynamic, charismatic, Scott Brownesque candidate,” referring to the Massachusetts senator. Or, he added, people are so angry with the president “that they can put up some tired old guy with no political experience and he could actually win.”

Do these people hope to die before the medicare and social security money runs out?

President Obama’s new order instructs federal agencies to design new strategies for hiring, promoting and keeping workers of “diverse” backgrounds. The diversity the government is seeking is not diversity of ideas, outlooks or work experiences. In contemporary political parlance, “diversity” refers primarily to the color of one’s skin and not the content of one’s character.

Like the "Great Society" programs that destroyed the Black family, the government, which already employs a disproportionate percentage of the Black population, and which is going to be downsized, is hiring people who are going to be fired.

Thomas Friedman: "way too soon to tell" if we should have known more about Obama.

“Way too soon to tell that kind of thing, I think,” Friedman said. “I think if — look, what have I been calling for, you know, the president to have — I think there is, we just so desperately needed a grand bargain that involves restructuring of debt, raising of taxes, cutting of spending and investing in the sources of our strengths as a country from everything from infrastructure to government-funded research to education. It’s so clear that’s what we need.

Obama, who has been criticized by Republicans for taking a vacation while many Americans face severe economic struggles, was briefed on market and financial developments by Brian Deese, a top economic aide

.

Is this better than checking the Wall Street Journal for a few minutes a day?

From what I saw of the rebels celebrating in Tripoli, firing their guns in the air (that seems to be a Middle Eastern tradition) I had three thoughts: (1) I would not want to be hit by the thousands of bullets dropping back to earth; (2) that's a target-rich environment, and (3) I would not be celebrating until I had the situation under control.

The Liberal Camp and the British Riots.

A scholar at Johns Hopkins blames "austerity cuts." So does The New York Times: "Economic malaise and cuts in spending and services instituted by the Conservative-led government have been recurring flashpoints for months." Reuters says a "sense of disenchantment" is shared by a "generation of young people with opportunities that fall well short of their aspirations." And—Well, you get the point: Yes, the hooligans have destroyed family businesses, trashed London institutions, sent millions of real and sweat equity up in flames, inflicted misery on thousands of innocent people. But one mustn't judge too harshly. One must try to understand.

There is no national debate about the epidemic of riots and looting that spread through our cities like a bush fire. Out there in the real world, where people go about the normal business of life, there is no sign of the heated argument that the media is so determined to air. In fact, I cannot remember a time when there has been such crushing unanimity on a matter of public importance: the answers to the questions of why this happened, what went wrong when it began to happen and what needs to follow in its aftermath are considered so blindingly self-evident as to be beyond rational disagreement.

At the margins of this consensus, there are some distant noises off. They are the desperate cries of those who fear that they have lost the argument of a lifetime and who want to persuade the great mass of the population that what it saw before its own eyes, hour by hour, night after night on the television news channels was something else altogether.

Back to Hinkle:

Here in the U.S. we've just been through a budget showdown in which the side that wanted government spending to grow at a slightly less rapid pace than the other side wanted was denounced as terrorists in the literal sense. So far, none of those who called peaceful Tea Party activists terrorists have flung the same accusation at the British rioters who have inflicted genuine terror. Interesting.

I've been a big critic of the romantic enthusiasm for high-speed trains in present-day American political discourse, so I was fascinated to run across this rather similar romanticization of high-speed rail in some Nazi propaganda (from 1932):

[example] The Nordic landscape cries out to be traversed by rails over which express trains can speed. It is a characteristic of all Nordic vehicles to increase their speed. Ever-increasing velocity is a built-in characteristic of the rails themselves, the rails by which, in the Nordic experience of the world, the whole world is penetrated.

...using their positions to damage nearly every industry in America. That is their intention. That is their goal.

Including this (read the whole thing).

• Energy Secretary Chu Embraces High Gas Prices, Again: "This weekend, Energy Secretary Steven Chu appeared on Fox News Sunday and host Chris Wallace asked him about his desire in 2008 for Americans to punitively pay more at the pump in order to wean them off of gasoline. Shockingly, Chu did not walk back his comments as he has attempted to do in the past. In fact, he embraced the strategy noting that his focus is to ease the pain felt by his energy policies by forcing automakers to make more fuel-efficient automobiles."

Seeing that their policies are making is increasingly leas likely that Obama will serve a second term, I'm working on the theory that they are trying to do as much damage as they can while they are in power.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

For a man with such big ears, Barack Hussein Obama isn't actually very good at listening. And a listening tour isn't going to change that.

Listening tours have become an obligatory stage of the early campaign, but their name is another degradation of meaning. Politicians don't conduct listening tours in order to listen to voters, but to have those voters listen to them. The occasional town hall meeting with its exchanges is the verbal version of a Letters to the Editor column. But does anyone pretend that a newspaper exists to listen to the readers?

Selfless euphemisms for selfish agendas clot the language of liberals. A listening tour dresses up the self-seeking campaign as a selfless act. The politician isn't on tour for his own sake, but to listen to you. The left called its totalitarian states, people's republics, when the people had nothing to do with it. And the listening tours have as much to do with listening to people, as the republics did with being ruled by them.

The Nation's editor, Katina vanden Heuvel insists that Obama should fight for "the People's Budget". This budget being a thing apart from the budget that the people actually want. The People's Budget was produced by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, consisting of left-wing loons and crooks like Charlie Rangel, John Conyers, Barney Frank, Keith Ellison, Alcee Hastings and Shirley Jackson- Lee.

It's hard to think of a segment of the people represented by crooked millionaires, many of whom were bribed into supporting the AT&T merger, who are above the law, and helped tank the economy with the frauds that they supported and oversaw.

...

Lean close to sniff at the messaging apparatus of the Democratic Party and it smells like the sweat of a car salesman's armpit. Behind the fake greek columns, the new logos and the social media is a crook trying to unload a lemon on you at twice the price. And if you buy now, he'll throw in a 15 trillion dollar deficit. Now the crook is driving around on a listening tour in his Death Star buses promising more jobs and lower deficits and a hill of magic beans.

...

Listening to someone means accepting the idea that there are things you don't know, and things you may be wrong about. That's hard to do when you're working from a philosophy that insists problems can be solved by following a rigid social or economic plan from a tenured academic. Why would you listen to someone who doesn't even have a PhD and is several social classes below you? Instead you smile patiently while he's talking and then explain to him why he's wrong. And it that doesn't work, you pretend to agree with him, while explaining that both of you actually share the same agenda. Your agenda.

...

If Obama were going to listen to the people, he had plenty of opportunities after he was elected. Instead he spent three years ignoring the people, condescending to the people, lecturing the people and vacationing at expensive places and overseas destinations to get away from the people. And his convoy tour is there to impress and awe the common folk with the scale of it. Like Putin staging a fake hunt or finding a trinket that was set there for him to find, this isn't about listening. It's about impressing. In both senses of the word.

The Not Listening Tour is supposed to remind us of Obama's importance, his easy manner and how photogenic he is. All qualities manufactured for him by media coverage. It's supposed to awe us with his entourage, and his wealth, which is really our wealth. It's not a listening tour, it's just another royal procession at public expense. And while kings may occasionally talk to commoners. They don't listen to them. Instead they toss some gold coins out the window, wave and drive on.

DRUDGE: "GM says bankruptcy excuses it from repairs..."

NEW YORK, Aug 19 (Reuters) - General Motors Co (GM.N) is seeking to dismiss a lawsuit over a suspension problem on more than 400,000 Chevrolet Impalas from the 2007 and 2008 model years, saying it should not be responsible for repairs because the flaw predated its bankruptcy.

In a bid to boost flagging autosales, the federal government will pay for any warranty repairs on a General Motors or Chrysler vehicle if either company can't because of financial problems or a bankruptcy filing, President Barack Obama said on Monday.

Sarah Palin Commercial

Want cheap drugs? Expect shortages.

I want my drugs cheap, safe and plentiful. So I’m going to get the government to oversee the cost, safety and efficacy of the drugs that corporations are allowed to sell.

So I’m surprised all to hell when the drugs I want when I want them are not available. After all, the government is in charge! So what if they shut some of the plants that make the drugs down? So what if the prices the government is willing to pay doesn’t make it profitable to manufacture? So what if the government tells the manufacturer that it won’t approve the drug for sale?

How many times does it have to be said that anyone can make it mistake but it takes the government to create a catastrophe?

Making sound proposals based on facts and logic is not their metier. Issuing impossible promises to the easily fooled is their specialty. For more on this, see "The 2012 Democratic Platform."

The entire Democratic Party is currently promising to "save" Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in their present form. According to Obama's own Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, in less than 10 years, spending on those three entitlement programs, plus servicing the national debt, will consume 92 cents of every dollar in the federal budget....

When blacks were only four generations out of slavery, their illegitimacy rate was about 23 percent (lower than the white illegitimacy rate is now). Then Democrats decided to help them! Barely two generations since LBJ's Great Society programs began, the black illegitimacy rate has tripled to 72 percent.

Meanwhile, the white illegitimacy rate has septupled, from 4 percent to 29 percent.

Instead of a "War on Poverty," it should have been called a "War on the Family."

The vast and permanent underclass created by the welfare state is a great success story for the Democratic Party, which now has a loyal constituency of deadbeats who automatically vote for the Democrats to keep their Trojan horse "benefits" flowing.

It's the Democrats' "heroin dealer" model of government.

Apparently, it takes a lot of government workers to minister to the poor, inasmuch as government employment has skyrocketed in tandem with the family's disintegration. As long as Democrats are serving their principal constituency -- recipients of taxpayer money -- they don't care what happens to the rest of society.

They champion any mob that will increase their political power. Liberals promote welfare dependency, class warfare, endless government programs staffed with public sector workers, street protests, coddling criminals and physical attacks on their ideological opponents. This is how they create reliable Democratic voters.

True, government employees are doing jobs we don't want done, can never be fired, are bankrupting the country and periodically break out in mob violence.

True, also, that the children of broken families sometimes burn city blocks to the ground or kill their great-grandmothers with swords. But what a voting bloc!

Friday, August 19, 2011

Just before his election as president, Barack Obama declared that "we are five days from fundamentally transforming America." He has made good on that promise. Huge increases in federal spending—up 28% in just three years—were the beginning. Putting health care—17% of the American economy—under Washington's control was next. Government control of business is expanding too: 379 new government business rules were added in July alone, according to Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming. Federal government debt held by the public rose from $6 trillion (40% of GDP) in 2008 to $9 trillion (62%) in 2010, The Congressional Budget Office says it could reach 200% by 2037, if the economy doesn't collapse first.

Transforming America has made Obama's hair greyer. Here's hoping that he doesn't manage to finish the task of finishing America. The latest polls indicate the he may be limited to a single term.

His latest challenge may well be from Texas Gov. Rick Perry's fresh presidential campaign speech: "The fact is, for nearly three years President Obama has been downgrading American jobs, he's been downgrading our standing in the world, he's been downgrading our financial stability, he's been downgrading our confidence and downgrading the hope for a better future for our children. That's a fact." Indeed it is, and it's a fact that bodes ill for the future of America.

The Obama Vacation in Martha's Vineyard

As he and his daughters bicycle around the summer playground of the Northeastern elite, Martha's Vineyard, President Obama is steadily bleeding away both the support of the nation and that of his most loyal constituency.

How could he not be depressed? He has made big mistakes since the beginning of his presidency and has been pounded since the beginning of his presidency. He's got to be full of doubts at this point about what to do. His baseline political assumptions have proved incorrect, his calculations have turned out to be erroneous, his big decisions have turned to dust. He thought they'd love him for health care, that it was a down payment on greatness. But the left sees it as a sellout, the center as a vaguely threatening mess, the right as a rallying cry. He thought the stimulus would turn the economy around. It didn't. He thought there would be a natural bounce-back a year ago, with "Recovery Summer." There wasn't. He thought a toe-to-toe, eyeball-to-eyeball struggle over the debt ceiling would enhance his reputation. The public would see through to the dark heart of Republican hackery and come to recognize the higher wisdom of his approach. That didn't happen either.

He's the smartest guy in the room? So the problems and setbacks are all bad luck? He has doubts, Peggy? He certainly hasn't shown any. He does have the top job in the Federal Government, a fleet of jets, a fleet of cars, a fleet of (new) buses, free housing, a staff of thousands, a great income and a lifetime pension. He may have screwed the country up for the rest of us, but he's set for life. He's got his, meanwhile the rest of the country is lined up looking for work.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Got this in my e-mail. "Charley Reese's final column for the Orlando Sentinel..."

545 vs. 300,000,000 People
-By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

You and I don't propose a federal budget. The President does.

You and I don't have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations. The House of Representatives does.

You and I don't write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don't set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don't control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don't care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator's responsibility to determine how he votes.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House now? He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted -- by present facts -- of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can't think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

If the tax code is unfair, it's because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it's because they want it in the red.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it's because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan ...

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it's because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like "the economy," "inflation," or "politics" that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees...

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

What you do with this article now that you have read it... is up to you.
This might be funny if it weren't so true.
Be sure to read all the way to the end:

Tax his land,
Tax his bed,
Tax the table,
At which he's fed.

Tax his tractor,
Tax his mule,
Teach him taxes
Are the rule.

Tax his work,
Tax his pay,
He works for
peanuts anyway!

Tax his cow,
Tax his goat,
Tax his pants,
Tax his coat.

Tax his ties,
Tax his shirt,
Tax his work,
Tax his dirt.

Tax his tobacco,
Tax his drink,
Tax him if he
Tries to think.

Tax his cigars,
Tax his beers,
If he cries
Tax his tears.

Tax his car,
Tax his gas,
Find other ways
To tax his ass.

Tax all he has
Then let him know
That you won't be done
Till he has no dough.

When he screams and hollers;
Then tax him some more,
Tax him till
He's good and sore.

STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, & our nation was the most prosperous in the world.
We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom, if agreed, stayed home to raise the kids.

Another outburst of union violence occurred last week in Lambertville, Michigan. John King, who lives in Lambertville, owns a construction company called King Electrical Services which has the temerity to hire men and women who–like 93% of America’s private sector workers–do not belong to unions. This outrages union bosses who want either to force King’s employees to join unions against their will, or else drive King’s company out of business. Their preferred tactic to achieve these ends is low-level violence:

What is the difference between slaves on plantations and blacks who blindly vote for Democrats? What does a slave-owner have to provide, free, for his slaves?1. Free Housing.2. Free Food.3. Free Healthcare4. A menial education sufficient to the task he requires the slave to perform.What is the one thing a slave owner required of his slaves?1. Unquestioning Loyalty.What do the democrats always promise to provide, free, to blacks?1. Free Housing.2. Free Food.3. Free healthcare4. A free menial education, sufficient to get them to the voting booth.What is the one thing Democrats require of their constituents?1. Unquestioning Loyalty.The only question black democrats have to ask themselves is:Who’s your master now?

In 2008, Reuters published one of those stories predicting that green power would be cost-competitive with fossil fuels in five years. Headline: "As Energy Costs Soar, U.S. Looks to Solar." Among the prophets was Richard Feldt, then the CEO of Evergreen Solar, who said that "it's not far away" and called for more subsidies. On Monday, Evergreen filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

This is just the kind of "green energy" that the Obama administration is touting as the source of millions of new jobs. So far, this fiasco has created 800 laid off workers in Massachusetts and Michigan. It's moved to China where the Chinese government is still willing to throw money away on unreliable technology; the Chinese can't vote on how their money is being wasted and corruption is the flavor of the day.

Funny story on Chinese corruption. A friend and his wife on a visit to China came upon a weathered, crumbling building that appeared to be hundreds (if not a thousand) years old. They went closer to examine this ancient landmark only to find a plaque announcing that it had been built with UN funds two years previously. Entire cities have been built in China and nobody lives in them. His comment was that of all the countries he has visited, China was the most corrupt. He was very concerned about what he viewed as the collapse of the "Chinese bubble."

Comment:

Keep an eye out for ZBB Energies, a Wisconsin battery company that Obama visited last year to tout as a leader in the new green economy. Last year they lost $9 million on $1 million of sales, and their top 2 executives each made half a million in salary.

I have noticed that the executives of these companies make a VERY pretty penny even as they burn through taxpayer subsidies all the way to bankruptcy.

Commenting of the rioting in England and the flash mobs in the US, Dorothy Rabinowitz opines:

The looting-bankers defense turns out to have been popular across the ocean as well. Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy had also divined—in a column last Tuesday titled "From London to Philadelphia, youths erupting over the theft of their futures"—that the bankers and their kind were to blame for the rioters in Britain and the flash mobs in America.

Think of their actions in both places, he advised, as the "alley version of the Wall Street bum rush and rip-off." First, explained Mr. Milloy, "there were flash mobs of bankers and mortgage lenders picking pockets, looting businesses, taking over homes." Now the young were using "a crude version of the same tactics" as they struck out in anger.

Mr. Milloy was apparently offended, too, that the black mayor of Philadelphia, Mr. Nutter, had advised young black men, after the flash riot there, that they would do well to find jobs. But, Mr. Nutter told them, they couldn't come to interviews with hair uncombed, a pick in the back, shoes untied, full arm and neck tattoos, and their pants half down. They weren't going to be hired looking like that, the mayor noted, "because you look like you're crazy."

Mr. Milloy, who described the mayor's remarks as even "nuttier" than others he had heard, had evidently found the remarks insensitive to these young. Youngsters who rioted and took part in flash mobs felt disrespected—that was why, Mr. Milloy explained, they were "threatening to destroy what they can't have. And why not?" It was a strategy that had worked, he added, for tea party anarchists.

For some reason, Mr. Milloy neglected to mention a key element in the violence of these youths—namely that it has been entirely and indisputably racial in its targets. The attackers are invariably young blacks, the people they assault invariably whites. This was true in Philadelphia as it was in Wisconsin, in Chicago and everywhere else that has seen these mobs.

And in the comments:

(a)The police in Cambridge questioned a man trying to break into a home (Henry Louis Gates and what turned out to be his own home) led to weeks of mainstream media reporting, a "national conversation about race," vilifications by President Obama and the "beer summit."

and yet (b) Marauding gangs of black youth beating whatever white people they come across in a number of cities across the country has elicited ... nary a peep. The race-obsessed New York Times ran for weeks with unsubstantiated (and ultimately probably untrue) claims of racially tinged comments by Tea Party members. This? Nothin'.

In a series of supplementary questions, respondents were queried about difficulties in finding workers proficient in certain types of skills; they were also asked to estimate training costs to bring new hires up to speed. Manufacturers’ responses to the August survey were not substantially different from those recorded in March 2007, when these questions were last asked. The workers seen as most difficult to find were those with

advanced computer skills, followed by those who were punctual and reliable. Training costs to bring a typical new hire up to speed were estimated at 6½ percent of annual compensation, on average. Firms also reported that the wage or salary of a typical worker was expected to rise by about 2½ percent, on average, over the next twelve months.

Ron Paul Ad - It's Good!

For some reason Obama believes that Americans will buy what manufacturers make. It's an example of his economic ignorance. Manufacturers, service providers, ... people who make things are desperately trying to determine what people want, and give it to them. If they make what people don't want they go out of business.

In Obama's mind, people who make things somehow force people to buy them so if car makers make small cars,people will go out to buy them instead of trucks and SUVs ... just because.

More important, what regime changes that might come of the civil wars in Libya and Syria are not going to be clearly victorious, those that are victorious are not going to be clearly democratic and those that are democratic are obviously not going to be liberal. The myth that beneath every Libyan is a French republican yearning to breathe free is dubious in the extreme.

This is something I have been saying from the beginning:

Foreign governments, from the United States to Turkey, have expressed their exasperation with the Syrians, but none has seriously contemplated an intervention. There are two reasons for this: First, following the Libyan intervention, everyone became more wary of assuming the weakness of Arab regimes, and no one wants a showdown on the ground with a desperate Syrian military. Second, observers have become cautious in asserting that widespread unrest constitutes a popular revolution or that the revolutionaries necessarily want to create a liberal democracy. The Sunnis in Syria might well want a democracy, but they might well be interested in creating a Sunni “Islamic” state. Knowing that it is important to be careful what you wish for, everyone seems to be issuing stern warnings to Damascus without doing very much.

This is the risk:

The issue isn’t whether human rights are important but whether supporting unrest in repressive states automatically strengthens human rights. An important example was Iran in 1979, when opposition to the oppression of the shah’s government was perceived as a movement toward liberal democracy. What followed might have been democratic but it was hardly liberal. Indeed, many of the myths of the Arab Spring had their roots both in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and later in Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, when a narrow uprising readily crushed by the regime was widely viewed as massive opposition and widespread support for liberalization.

The world is more complicated and more varied than that. As we saw in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass support. Nor are the alternatives necessarily more palatable than what went before or the displeasure of the West nearly as fearsome as Westerners like to think. Libya is a case study on the consequences of starting a war with insufficient force. Syria makes a strong case on the limits of soft power. Egypt and Tunisia represent a textbook lesson on the importance of not deluding yourself.

The pursuit of human rights requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances are. It is important to remember that it is not Western supporters of human rights who suffer the consequences of failed risings, civil wars or revolutionary regimes that are committed to causes other than liberal democracy.

Monday, August 15, 2011

As we all know, thanks to the unbiased media, the Tea Party people are racists and terrorists with no reason except hate for their position . If you don't believe that you won't find support for your position in the Virginian Pilot. Meanwhile ...

A scholar at Johns Hopkins blames "austerity cuts." So does The New York Times: "Economic malaise and cuts in spending and services instituted by the Conservative-led government have been recurring flashpoints for months." Reuters says a "sense of disenchantment" is shared by a "generation of young people with opportunities that fall well short of their aspirations." And—

Well, you get the point: Yes, the hooligans have destroyed family businesses, trashed London institutions, sent millions of real and sweat equity up in flames, inflicted misery on thousands of innocent people. But one mustn't judge too harshly. One must try to understand. And to mollify.

You hear that sort of flummery a lot.

Or at least you hear it when the perpetrators of mayhem are objects of liberal approval. Labor unions, demonstrators against global free-trade agreements, environmentalist activists—they have legitimate grievances that must be addressed. The blind rage of young people in working-class neighborhoods is the product of socioeconomic conditions. They should not be held responsible for their actions—the people who created the conditions should be held responsible. (David Cameron, this means you.)

Funny thing, though: You didn't hear that sort of guff in 2009, when middle-class conservatives turned up at town halls across the country to vent about health-care reform. Back then, the town-hall events were filled with "angry, sign-carrying mobs," wrote Politico, which lamented the way constituents were "shouting criticism" at members of Congress. Signs and criticism: Oh my!

"Angry mobs" were trying to "destroy president Obama," fumed Democratic Party leaders back then. "This is something new and ugly," seethed Paul Krugman of The New York Times, which described the town hall events as "brutal." No one seemed interested in the root causes of the sign-wavers' agitation then. You didn't hear much about the "disillusionment" and "disenchantment" of Tea Party protesters who marched on Washington in September 2009, and again the following March.

To be fair, after the Taxpayer March on Washington on 9/12, Reuters did pause to wonder what the source of public anger was: "Protests Against Obama: Race or Policy?" it asked, noting how "former President Jimmy Carter said out loud what Democrats had been whispering for a while, that the protests against the country's first black president are tinged with racism."

When conservatives wave signs, it's not "unrest" caused by a "sense of disenchantment." It's because they're bigots. Society as a whole is not to blame; they are, individually. They need an attitude adjustment. When violent mobs of young people burn down a city, though, they are not individually responsible—society as a whole is (or at least that part of society that ostensibly ticked them off). They don't need an attitude adjustment: conservatives do.

Evergreen, which closed its taxpayer-supported Devens factory in March and cut 800 jobs, has been trying to rework its debt for months. The cash-strapped company announced today has sought a reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware and reached a deal with certain note holders to restructure its debt and auction off assets.

Evergreen Solar Was Hoping to Hire 90 to 100 People for Its Manufacturing Plant. "Evergreen Solar, the Marlborough-based maker of solar panels, also is hoping to hire 90 to 100 people at a manufacturing plant in Devens, said Gary Pollard, vice president of human resources. The plant, which opened last summer, is expected to employ more than 800 when it reaches full capacity."

By January of this year this taxpayer supported example of "green energy and green jobs creation" fired 800 employees and moved its manufacturing to China.

Aided by at least $43 million in assistance from the government of Massachusetts and an innovative solar energy technology, Evergreen Solar emerged in the last three years as the third-largest maker of solar panels in the United States.

Michael El-Hillow, chief executive of Evergreen, said falling prices for panels led to the closing.

But now the company is closing its main American factory, laying off the 800 workers by the end of March and shifting production to a joint venture with a Chinese company in central China. Evergreen cited the much higher government support available in China.

For some reason government officials believe that they have the ability to identify the "next big thing" and bring it to fruition. And they always fail. But they keep trying because, like true believers in communism, they think that the right people have not been in charge.

Try to keep a straight face when a reporter tells you that reporters only report the news, they don't shape it.

Art Cashin lives on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and because he's not hobbled by a college degree, he's a fount of knowledge and a very sharp observer of current events - on or off the markets. Here's an interesting piece of historic trivia that he shares with us today, illustrating that "making it up" is not a new thing for newspeople of all genders and sexual preferences.

On this day (-1) in the year 1900, American and European forces broke through Chinese lines around the Imperial City of Peking (now Beijing). They freed hundreds of terrified non-Chinese hostages and thus broke the back of the "Boxer Rebellion".

History books will tell you that the original anti-foreign rebellion in China was sanctioned by the Dowager Empress and driven by the secret "Society of the Harmonious Fists" (Boxers - get it!). While those facts are true, the real facts may be more ironic.

The Boxer Rebellion may have started, by accident, in America. According to some reports, about a year or more earlier, a bunch of hard drinking reporters were sitting around exchanging their frustrations that the "event du jour" had failed to appear.

How could they meet their deadlines. Being good journalists who needed the meager paycheck they agreed to do the obvious thing - - make up a story. But it had to be a good story. And it had to be a lulu. But these guys were pros. So they invented a story that wealthy Americans and Europeans were planning to buy, dismantle and transport the Great Wall of China (as nearly a century later some would do with the Berlin Wall). What the hay -- it was fun -- it met the deadline -- it sold papers.

But somehow the short-lived story reached China. Chinese nationals were inflamed. Word of mouth said foreigners wish to rape our heritage and national treasures. Hostility turned to aggression and then it inspired the Boxer Rebellion.

Today, the need for a paycheck is just as great for the storytellers in the press; at least the ones still collecting one in that failing industry (faster please).

Just as the Chinese were a handy and despised tool for the racist media of that time, the Tea Party folks fill that niche for the modern day opinion shapers. This may be why my local waste of newsprint – the Virginian Pilot (motto: "True to the Democratic Party in victory or defeat") fills its editorial pages with the confident prediction of the demise of their enemies. Perhaps taking their cue from one of their leaders, Harry Reid, they tell us that the Tea Party is OVER, DEAD, DYING, FINI, DEFUNCT, “pining for the fiords.”

I suspect that this is designed for Republican running for office, to influence the more susceptible ones to betray their natural constituents. Even as the anti-Tea Party standard bearer is sinking in the polls, the modern day scribblers are telling us that Americans really don’t want the debt reduced, that they really like the federal government telling us what to eat and drink, how to flush and what light bulbs we can use; that we don’t want our electricity made with coal and we’re willing to see our power bills skyrocket; that Obama really is focused like a laser beam on jobs especially on the golf course and on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. They really want us to believe that the US debt was downgraded because the Tea Party was calling for a default when the only ones talking about it were Democrats and their amen corner in the press. They want us to believe that the path to jobs and prosperity is more spending and more debt because that has worked so well the last three years. They want us to believe that if we don’t like Obama’s policies we’re racists because there cannot be any other reason. They want us to believe that raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires and people who own jets is the answer to ending the deficit, and that providing health insurance to 30 million people will lower health care costs.

I find it easier to believe that rich Americans and Europeans will buy the Great Wall of China and move it to Las Vegas because I may be gullible but I’m not stupid.

The left isn’t doing this because it’s on the defensive or desperate. On the contrary, this is its main strategy. How else can you persuade about half the population, liberals and centrists, to support the most left-wing policy in American history? That’s why they need a strategy based on hate, fear, stereotyping, demonetization of the “other,” rejection of diversity, and all those other things that political correctness and multiculturalism supposedly oppose!

UK: Planet of the Apes

As part of my promotional efforts, I chanced to find myself on a TV show the other day with an affable liberal who argued that what Obama needed to do was pass another trillion-dollar – or, better yet, multi-trillion – stimulus. I think not. The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: they have been marinated in "stimulus" their entire lives. There is literally nothing you can't get Her Majesty's Government to pay for. From page 205 of my book:

"A man of 21 with learning disabilities has been granted taxpayers' money to fly to Amsterdam and have sex with a prostitute."

Hey, why not? "He's planning to do more than just have his end away," explained his social worker. "Refusing to offer him this service would be a violation of his human rights."

Why do they need a Dutch hooker? Just another hardworking foreigner doing the jobs Britons won't do? Given the reputation of English womanhood, you'd have thought this would be the one gig that wouldn't have to be outsourced overseas.

While the British Treasury is busy writing checks to Amsterdam prostitutes, one-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works – in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One-tenth of the adult population has done not a day's work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997.

If you were born into such a household, you've been comprehensively "stimulated" into the dead-eyed zombies staggering about the streets this past week: pathetic inarticulate subhumans unable even to grunt the minimal monosyllables to BBC interviewers desperate to appease their pathologies. C'mon, we're not asking much: just a word or two about how it's all the fault of government "cuts" like the leftie columnists argue.